The Observer, September 2003
Volunteer Profile: New volunteer brings strong record to work on council science committee
When Roger Green joined the Scientific Advisory Committee early this year, the citizens’ council got a top gun in the field of environmental science.
Green, who holds a Ph.D. in zoology from Cornell University, has a resume’ of research and publication in environmental science that goes back almost forty years. His work has taken him around the world, from Canada to Australia to Asia. He’s written dozens of articles for academic journals, as well as a book -- on designing environmental studies -- that has become something of a standard reference in the field.
That book, “Sampling Design and Statistical Methods for Environmental Biologists,” is still in print 24 years after its first publication. The 272-page volume is available today on Amazon.Com -- if you have the $150 cover price!
More recently, Green helped oversee the numerous studies done on the impacts of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and helped design a bowhead whale study on Alaska’s North Slope for the federal government.
In his home office, Roger Green sports a pair of Nerd Glasses, the official eyewear of PWSRCAC's Scientific Advisory Committee.
“He is a gold mine,” said Lisa Ka’aihue, the project manager who works with the Scientific Advisory Committee. “Just about everyone in the environmental science field up here knows and respects Roger and has told me how lucky we are to have him as a volunteer. I also find him unique in that he communicates well with technical folks as well as lay folks. Many Ph.D. scientists don’t have that ability.”
Green was born in New York City, and moved with his parents to the Washington, D.C., area in his junior-high years. After high school, he got a bachelor of science degree in biology from the College of William and Mary in Virginia, followed by four years of work at Cornell for the doctorate he received in 1965.
His first exposure to Prince William Sound came long before the Exxon Valdez spill. In 1960 and 1961 he was, as he describes it, “summer slave labor” in Cordova for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. One of his jobs: counting pink salmon.
After Cornell, he got a Fulbright fellowship that took him to Australia for a two-year study of Queensland’s Moreton Bay. After that came a job at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.
Then, in the late 1960s came a job offer at a fresh-water research institute at the University of Manitoba in Canada. As he flew into Winnipeg, Green recalls, “Just from the plane, I saw thousands of lakes. I said, ‘Boy, there’s a lot I can do here!”
And so it was that Canada became his base for most of the next three decades. In addition to his fresh-water work, he did a major bivalve study in Hudson’s Bay.
Over the years, however, he found himself doing less and less field work and more and more study design, leading to publication of his book on the subject in 1979.
Just as it came out, he took a position at the University of Western Ontario. He taught courses and took on an increasing amount of consulting work, which led him to such exotic locales as Malaysia, Singapore, and Australia.
1989 saw him involved with Prince William Sound again, in the aftermath of the Exxon Valdez spill. The state and federal governments asked him to chair a three-member committee to oversee the design of the numerous studies of the spill’s environmental impacts. At one point, he recalls, 72 studies were going on simultaneously in the area -- stretching from Prince William Sound to Kodiak Island and the Alaska Peninsula -- affected by the giant spill.
After his retirement from the University of Western Ontario in 1999, Green spent time in Asia, where, among other things, he was visiting professor at a Malaysian university.
Late last year, Green arrived back in Alaska -- this time to stay a while -- after his wife took a job as professor in the College of Education at the University of Alaska Anchorage.
“With my whole Prince William Sound connection and history, it was very much like going back to something, which appealed to me,” Green said.
Since settling into a home in southeast Anchorage early this year, Green has continued his consulting work, is writing another book, and has become a major contributor on the Scientific Advisory Committee.
It took him some time, he said, to grasp exactly what the citizens’ council is and does. It’s a private non-profit corporation, yet it has a government mandate and a broadly diverse board of member-entity representatives based primarily on geography.
“It’s forced to be democratic,” Green said. “Therefore, it’s going to appear to be inefficient at times. But I’m not going to criticize it for being less efficient than some company, because it’s not a company. I think it operates the way it has to operate.”